After Baghdad comes Mt Albert

Labour MP David Shearer acknowledges success, watched by Labour leader Phil Goff. Photo / Getty Images

David Shearer has never lasted more than five years in a job: when he gets bored, he moves on.

"You've got to be able to make a difference and make some change and it has to be challenging," he says. "When either of these things start to disappear you tend to move along."

The 63 per cent of Mt Albert electors who yesterday voted him their new MP may be taken aback by this. Their last MP - Helen Clark - held the job for 28 years.

Accustomed to ducking bombs in Baghdad, Shearer easily avoided anything lobbed at him during the election campaign.

When he decided to return home to run for Parliament, he was deputy head of the United Nations mission in Iraq.

After being selected, Shearer told his UN boss, Staffan de Mistura, that he had to get home fast. "He said the UN is always here but you need to follow your heart."

Shearer's back in Auckland, but his wife Anuschka and children Vetya, 12 and Anastasia, 10, are still packing up the house in Amman, Jordan.

"I've never really had a plan a year or two in advance," he says.

Shearer's ideology came under scrutiny during the campaign, when right-wing bloggers revealed that he had written in support of private armies.

In a 1998 article for the journal Foreign Affairs he outlined possible benefits of private soldiers in countries where the Government was weak.

He said he was inspired to write the article after witnessing the brutality of the war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. Mercenaries were not ideal, "but for some of those people, I wouldn't change what I wrote".

On the campaign trail Shearer fared better than his nearest rival, National's gaffe-prone Melissa Lee, but it still wasn't plain sailing. During one miserable Auckland day the long hours caught up with Shearer while canvassing. "It had gone well past my dinner-time and it was wet and cold."

He decided to pack it in for the evening and start afresh tomorrow. As a new MP he may not have that luxury.